BitTorrent, Java, Azureus

I wanted to bookmark this Slashdot story about BitTorrent. I’ve used bittorrent a number of times, and it’s quite remarkable. Supposedly, a staggering percentage of Internet traffic these days is due to BitTorrent; I can’t recall the exact percentage, but it’s something like half of all the Internet traffic.

For the uninitiated, BitTorrent is a ‘net infrastructure that allows distributed downloads. In English, it basically means that the more demand there is for a particular file, the faster it downloads. Note that this is contrary to normal downloading; when there is high demand for a normal file, typically the servers that host the file are overloaded and if you can get the file at all, it’s really slow. So BitTorrent is a way to solve these problems.

I have been using a BitTorrent program called Azureus, which is written in java and is therefore cross-platform. It has worked quite well until I recently updated it, though now as I look on the site I see there is a bug that has been addressed on the system. I am indeed experiencing the problems they outline, so I’ll apparently have to try upgrading my java installation.

So yeah, this post is mostly for my own use later. I don’t expect many people to be innarested in it…